I love romance books.

I was not one of those people who found hidden piles of romance novels under my mother’s bed, because she was probably reading academic journals instead, but I always gravitated to the romantic subplots in any book I read. I remember hiding behind the fold-out couch that was my bed in third grade and reading and re-reading the single page in my Babysitters Club Book where Logan kisses Mary Anne for the first time. I fell deep into romance during the pandemic, as a lot of us did, and soon began accumulating favorite authors as well as an appreciation for the tropes and the patterns. There was the Meet-Cute and the Third-Act Break-up (boo) and, God willing, the Only-One-Bed. And in contemporary M/F romance, there was almost always the scene where our main characters are suddenly overcome by horniness somewhere away from home and discover they don’t have a condom. “I’m on the pill,” the FMC will usually say, or sometimes, “I have an IUD,” and as a nurse practitioner who works in reproductive healthcare I would cheer in appreciation. Then the next line, almost always: “And I was just tested – I’m clean.”           

 Insert sad brake-screeching sound here.             

The opposite of clean is dirty. I don’t think the authors who use the word “clean” intend any harm. When these authors meet someone with an STI, especially a treatable but uncurable infection such as herpes or HIV, I don’t believe they think, that person is dirty. It is just something that gets repeated over and over, like our beloved tropes and is incidentally an upgrade from thirty years ago when condoms and STDs didn’t even exist in Romancelandia and heroes were constantly foisting surprise pregnancies on the heroines. But language conveys meaning and even the lack or opposite of language signifies who fits into these stories and who does not. Because I have also never read one of the main characters say, “I just got tested and I actually dohave an STD so let’s go look for that condom ASAP.”            

I am an extremely distractable reader – all my friends know this. If there is one dumb factual or continuity error in a book, I cannot get over it. And I think what I found so jarring about this endless parade of STI-free people in my books was that it didn’t match what I saw every day at my work in the clinic, where people – especially young, hot, sex-having people – would occasionally test positive for something, get treated, then continue on with their lives. 

I know romance is supposed to be fantasy, an escape from the confusing, cruel world we live in today, so it’s not like I expect every heroine in every cozy hometown romance to also be dealing with a stress-induced herpes outbreak. But I’d just like to read about one person, once, somewhere, who momentarily has gonorrhea and is also really hot and gets to have on-page sex. It sounds silly when I tell people, but it’s about representation. It comes down to the question that the entire romance genre is built around – who deserves to love and be loved? And our answer is always, everyone.

And as one last note, I have been so pleased to see certain characters, popping up in certain author’s novels, who, when they find themselves in that condomless truck bed or restaurant bathroom, say “I was just tested and I’m clear.” It’s just one (1) letter! And it makes all the difference.